Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus CPU Cooler Review

Heatsink Construction & Design

At its highest point the Hyper 212 PLUS is officially 158.5mm tall, 120mm wide and with one fan attached it is 70mm deep. It weighs in at 626 grams; and on a first cursory look, nothing really jumps out and says “Hi I’m one mean machine built for extreme cooling". It looks like your typical dual slab sided cooler with four copper heatpipes for cooling and a relatively simplistic double face design to the fin array. Well, as the old saying goes you should never judge a book by its cover ‘cause this thing is full of design goodies.


The “boring” looking double faced fin array is the first thing worth mentioning. This IS an HDT cooler and this is the first one we have reviewed which takes this double faced approach. Being able to easily and “officially” mount a secondary fan to the 212 PLUS may just tip the balance on the i7 gauntlet and give the Prolimatech cooler a run for its money.


When you take an even closer look at those two faces of the fin array, you notice that the little tunnel and wave appearance on each end of the face is not there for looks but to act as a de facto fan shroud. By pushing the fan approximately 1/8" away from the heatsink's face, some air may escape from the top an bottom but the majority of the air will flow easily through the face…without any dead zone for the fan hub. It may not sound like much but this little tweak should do amazing things for the static pressure levels needed to properly push air through the fins and should make any fan work smarter, not harder. In the past we bemoaned the lack of high tech tweaks to the faces of the HDT coolers we had seen, and while the actual face of the unit is still a slab sided “old school” face, we actually don’t think this one needs any more tweaks.


The heatpipes themselves -of which there are four large U-type units- are staggered in a left to right fashion in order to allow more fresh air to flow over them when compared to the more mundane double row affair (as seen on the PromlimaTech). These heatpipes may be the smaller 6mm heatpipes versus the 8mm pipes found on the OCZ Vendetta 2 but since there are more of them, the overall efficiency of this setup should be greater. This of course assumes all four heatpipes are in contact with the CPU. In the past, we found that the four heatpipes directly touching the CPU to be less efficient on the 775 test bed, but as the OCZ Gladiator Max was reviewed long before our i7 system arrived on the scene…things may not be so cut and dry.


Moving onto to base of this unit we come to the main event…so to speak. As stated previously, this is a four x 6mm HDT cooler with the pipes in a double staggered row. Unlike the bases on previous HDTs -which while polished adequately were far from a mirror bright finish- the 212 Plus' is finished awfully darn well. It may not make a great mirror for shaving but this is more the fault of the aluminum inserts than the quality of the finishing work on the heatpipes themselves. We consider this HDT cooler to be easily the best finished one we have seen. On a side note, the 3 inner aluminum pillars / inserts have small lines scored into them which should make applying TIM to them even easier.